Abstract

This article examines a paradox embedded in our concept of spatio-temporal events as they are singled out through phenomenal observation, and uses it to expose the objective and inescapable limits of any attempt to naturalize consciousness. I argue that reductions of phenomena to a supposedly more fundamental “physical” level inevitably fail, because the physical events described by scientific theories are themselves irreducibly phenomenal. On this basis, the so-called hard problem of consciousness is not a profound mystery but an illusion grounded in a category mistake: we search for a “machine in the ghost,” for a physical explanation within what is, both before and after any reduction, an irreducible phenomenal domain.